Léo Fitouchi

Research Fellow

Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse,

Toulouse School of Economics

I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) and Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE).

The main goal of my research is to understand human normativity. Why do human minds produce moral judgments? What is the computational architecture of moral cognition? Why do moral norms, religious traditions, and punitive institutions exhibit similar features across human societies?

I answer these questions by integrating insights and methods from cognitive science (e.g., moral psychology), social sciences (e.g., anthropology), and evolutionary theory (e.g., evolutionary biology, cultural evolution). I test the accounts I propose with psychological experiments and cross-cultural databases.

You can find a copy of my CV here.

Selected publications

Fitouchi L. & Nettle, N. (2025). Harmless bodily pleasures are moralized because they are perceived as reducing self-control and cooperativeness. Cognition. [PDF]

Fitouchi L., Singh, M., André, J.-B., Baumard, N. (2025). Prosocial religions as folk-technologies of mutual policing. Psychological Review. [PDF]

Lie-Panis, J., Fitouchi, L., Baumard, N., André, J.-B (2024). The social leverage effect: Institutions transform weak reputation effects into strong incentives for cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(51). [PDF]

Fitouchi, L., & Singh, M. (2023). Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies. Evolution and Human Behavior, 44(5), 502-514. [PDF]

Fitouchi, L., André, J.-B. & Baumard, N. (2023). Moral disciplining: the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of puritanical morality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (target article) 46, e293. [PDF]

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